The Bunyip Aristocracy’s Favourite Battler, Part One
On 2 March 1996, the voters of Oxley unfolded a ballot paper that was already out of date. Beside the name Pauline Hanson, former Ipswich councillor and co-owner of a fish and chip shop in Silkstone, it printed the word Liberal. By then she was nothing of the kind. The party had dumped her weeks earlier, but nominations had closed, and the paper stayed as printed.
It is the sort of curious accident that draws conspiracy theorists like blowflies to a long drop in summer. Yet Hanson’s rise was no plot. It was something more ordinary, and in the end more damning.
The Liberals had disendorsed her over a letter to the editor of The Queensland Times. In it she dismissed black deaths in custody, accused governments of creating racism and complained that Aboriginal people had it too easy. She also rehashed the front-bar myth about how little “Aboriginal blood” ran in the veins of those living high on the hog of government largesse. It is a gibe as risible, and as despicable, as the one about refugees handed houses by a grateful government counting on their votes. Votes they are not eligible to cast.
Oxley was Labor’s. It had been Bill Hayden’s seat for 27 years, and Labor had held it without a break since 1961. Hanson took it with 48.6 percent of the primary vote on a swing of nineteen percent. The “White Queen”, as David Marr would later call the MP whose career rests on racism, was on her way to Canberra.
See an invisible hand? A notorious racist is disendorsed just late enough to keep the brand on the ballot, then wins the one Queensland seat Labor could not lose. Cui bono, as our learned silks will say. Who benefits?
It is a fair question. It is not an answer. Cui bono is where an investigation starts, not where it ends. Reasoning backwards from a beneficiary to a plot is the oldest dodge in the conspiracy game: it happened, someone gained, therefore someone arranged it. It is motive mistaken for method, in a trench coat.
It’s not that late disendorsements rare. The Australia Institute counts them as part and parcel of our elections: dump a candidate once nominations have closed and your party’s name stays on the paper regardless, like the sauce stain on your shirt after a democracy sausage. Hanson was one of five independents elected that year, many of them refugees from a major party.
So which legend needs a cold shower? It runs like this: a plain-speaking Ipswich mum, armed with nothing but common sense and a vat of hot fat, built a political party with her own two hands. To serve other battlers. It is a good story, with the smell of vinegar and newsprint about it, and it has served her for thirty years.
But Hanson had a lot of help. And an abundance of funds from right wing sources. She still does.
Even “her” shop had a co-owner. The fish and chips came from Marsden’s Seafood, run through a company she shared with her business partner, Morrie Marsden, who went on to work on her 1996 campaign. In the legend, nobody mentions the sign over the door.
Within days of her win, Graeme Campbell, the maverick Western Australian MP Labor had just expelled, sent her one of his own staffers. John Pasquarelli became her adviser and press secretary, and has since claimed he wrote her maiden speech. She sacked her helper in December 1996, by which time, Green Left Weekly reported, he had been assembling a Hanson Senate ticket stacked with Campbell’s Australia First, Australians Against Further Immigration and the Australian League of Rights.
The League needed no invitation. In October 1996 its leader, Eric Butler, pledged Hanson “all possible support”, and the League paid to print and distribute tens of thousands of copies of her maiden speech.
That same month came the grassroots. Bruce Whiteside, a Gold Coast campaigner against Japanese investment and a former candidate for the far-right Confederate Action Party, founded the Pauline Hanson Support Movement. Branches sprang up across Queensland. Real people paid real subscriptions.
Enter the two Davids.
David Oldfield was a Manly councillor and a Liberal who had missed out on preselection. When he met Hanson he was working for Tony Abbott, and while still on Abbott’s payroll he began to build her a party. His partner in the venture was David Ettridge, a pro fundraiser whose career includes UNICEF and World Vision.
Early in 1997, as the University of Queensland’s archive records it, Hanson and her two advisers took over the Support Movement, expelled Whiteside and used its membership list to register a party. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation was launched at Ipswich on 11 April 1997.
The party itself had exactly three members: Hanson, Ettridge and Oldfield. The thousands who believed they had joined a people’s movement belonged to something else entirely. They paid the subs; three people held the keys.
Oldfield says that had he won Liberal preselection for Manly, he would never have met Hanson, and her party would not exist. Of the woman whose party he built, he later wrote:
“I felt Pauline was never up to the job and failed miserably day after day.”
Nobody planted Pauline Hanson. She was assembled, by a Liberal staffer, a charity fundraiser and a mailing list commandeered from the far right.
And for a while the kit worked. In June 1998 One Nation won eleven seats in the Queensland parliament with almost a quarter of the vote. The major parties panicked. If the Liberals had ever wanted her in Canberra, they now had an odd way of showing it.
Abbott’s former staffer had built the party; Abbott now set out to tear it down. In 1998 he set up a trust he called, with a straight face, Australians for Honest Politics. This is the same Tony Abbott who would later tell Kerry O’Brien that only his “carefully prepared scripted remarks” should be taken as “gospel truth”. The trust raised close to $100,000 from twelve donors Abbott declined to name, and its job, in his own words, was to fund court cases against One Nation. One donor was later outed: Harold Clough, West Australian construction magnate, Liberal donor and board member of the Institute of Public Affairs.
By the federal election of October 1998, two years after her maiden speech, the map had moved under her feet. A redistribution had split Oxley in two. Its Brisbane end stayed a seat that leant hard to Labor, while most of Hanson’s rural heartland beyond Ipswich went into a new seat, Blair. She turned down a likely Senate seat and chanced her arm there.
Labor, the Liberals and the Nationals all preferenced each other ahead of her. Hanson won 36 percent of the primary vote to the Liberal Cameron Thompson’s 21.7. Thompson ran third, overtook Labor on National preferences, then overtook Hanson on Labor’s. She was out on her ear.
Abbott was not finished. His lawyers backed a One Nation dissident, Terry Sharples, in a challenge to the party’s registration, and the Supreme Court of Queensland found One Nation had been fraudulently registered using the Support Movement’s list.
In August 2003 Hanson and Ettridge were convicted of electoral fraud and jailed for three years.
In November the Court of Appeal quashed both convictions. Hanson had served eleven weeks. She walked out of prison a martyr. The Martyrdom of Pauline has paid dividends ever since.
So throw the charge out of court. The establishment, with an IPA board member among its paymasters, spent its money ending her career, not launching it. Nobody planted Pauline Hanson.
But acquit the conspiracy and something worse walks out of the courtroom. To find it, you have to go back a decade before she was sown, to a paddock the mining lobby had been ploughing since 1985.
Part 2 follows Wednesday.
